Stealing music is legal again. On June 2, 2016, in VMG Salsoul, LLC v. Ciccone, the Ninth Circuit held that a sampled horn hit in Madonna’s “Vogue” was de minimis, infringing on neither the composition nor the recording of its source. The Ninth thus split from the Sixth Circuit’s notorious decision in Bridgeport Music, Inc. v. Dimension Films to exclude the de minimis defense from recording infrin...

Trade secret theft in the United States is a serious problem, and criminal penalties exist for this misconduct in both federal and state statutes. For twenty years, the literature in this area has focused almost entirely on the federal statute, the Economic Espionage Act. However, federal prosecutors have shown little interest in bringing charges under this statute unless the case involves theft o...

Determining which patents are valuable can seem a lot like picking winning lottery numbers. There were, as of 2014, approximately 2.5 million U.S. patents in force. The number of new patent applications has risen steadily to more than 411,728 each year, and if the current trend continues, about 70 percent of those applications will become patents. Like lottery tickets, most patents are worthless, ...

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided an increasing number of intellectual property (IP) cases—especially patent cases—over the last several terms. Which prior cases influence the stated reasoning in these recent Supreme Court IP cases? A handful of citation studies of supreme courts in the United States, both state and federal, conducted over the last forty years suggests that the Court would most o...

In his 1942 short story, “Runaround,” Isaac Asimov set forth three “laws” for robots: A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or S...

Congress, while enacting at least six major revisions to patent law since 1793, has left the definition of patentable subject matter essentially unchanged. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, has been uncomfortable with the concept for more than a century. Despite this long-standing discomfort, it has struggled to advance a theoretical basis for its concern. In a series of recent cases, it has f...

The Fourth Amendment’s Third Party Doctrine has recently been extended to cover a person’s interest in their digital information. This has allowed more data to become accessible to government agencies than ever before. Under this doctrine, as soon as digital information is provided to a third party (such as Google or Facebook), it is no longer entitled to a presumption that the originator of the i...

In the summer of 2015 amidst the beginnings of the 2016 presidential campaign, historic Supreme Court decisions, and regular reports of protests, some might have missed the copyright angle to the Ashley Madison story. In fact, many may have missed the Ashley Madison story altogether. It is worth retelling, in brief, because it highlights the question with which this article is concerned – to what ...

The impact of modern technology cannot be overstated; it has quickly impacted the lives of most Americans in a relatively short amount of time. In 2012, 78% of Americans reported owning a desktop or laptop computer. In 2014, 64% of Americans stated that they owned a smartphone. Of those surveyed, 44% of cell owners admitted to sleeping next to their phones so that they would not miss an important ...

Digest

When the founding fathers laid the bedrock of patent law, they created a list of conditions that an invention must meet to be patentable. An invention must be novel, non-obvious, described in a manner which allows others to practice it, and more. But the cardinal condition is that the inve... More »

When Google developed its mobile platform, Android, the company copied some of the code as well as the structure, sequence, and organization (SSO) of 37 Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Oracle gained ownership of Java, a widely-used open-source software language, when it acq... More »

As capital intensive public goods, pharmaceuticals are likely to receive inefficiently-low investment in the absence of government intervention. The patent system functions well to promote innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. However, because innovation in pharmaceuticals depends on ... More »